by Tami Hoag
At that same moment Jack stood on the balcony at L'Amour, staring out at the bayou, suffering through a kind of hell Jimmy Lee Baldwin had never known—the hell of conscience. He had wandered the empty streets of town after leaving Laurel, trying to clear his head, and had ended up at Madame Collette's for a cup of coffee just as the breakfast crowd was coming in. Ruby Jeffcoat had wasted no time telling him the news, her eyes gleaming with malicious relish. Her sister Louise was a dispatcher in the sheriff's office and had it all firsthand. Some maniac had up and killed Savannah Chandler and left a page from one of Jack's books in her hand—stuck right under her thumb, so as not to blow away.
The rest of her juicy details had glanced off Jack. He didn't hear a word about how Chad Garrett had gotten sick and started a chain reaction with the deputies at the scene. He didn't hear Ruby's first sermon of the day on how women who behaved as whores were just asking for the kind of end Savannah Chandler had met. He didn't hear the clatter of coffee cups or the ring of flatware on china. He sat there at the counter, feeling as if he were having an out-of-body experience, and fragments of something Jimmy Lee Baldwin had said flashed in his head like lightning. “. . . unstable minds . . . commit unspeakable acts . . .”
Savannah was dead. All that wild, tormented spirit gone, wrung out and discarded like a rag. She had been so vibrant, so full of need and hate. He could hardly imagine all of that energy simply ceasing to exist.
No, not simply. There had been nothing simple about her death. It had been prolonged and hideous. “. . . unstable minds . . . unspeakable acts . . .” And she'd been found with a scrap of one of his books in her hand.
Stupidly, he wondered which book, which page, calling to mind a hundred scenes of death that had been telegraphed from his imagination down through his fingers and onto the pages of a book. Which one had Savannah been forced to endure?
Furious with himself, he stalked back into his bedroom and went to his desk. He didn't write to inspire; he wrote to entertain. He wrote to exorcise his own inner demons, not to lure others' out of hiding. He couldn't be held responsible because someone had used him as an excuse to commit murder. If it hadn't been his book, it would have been a song on the radio or a voice on television or a telepathic message from God. Blame could always be placed elsewhere.
Christ, he knew that, didn't he? He wasn't responsible; it was someone else's fault.
His writer's mind too easily conjured up an image of Savannah lying dead along the bayou, sightless eyes staring up at an unmerciful heaven. Swearing viciously, he swept an arm across his desk, sending debris flying—manuscript pages, scribbled notes, a royalty statement, pens, paper clips. He snatched up a stack of copies of Evil Illusions and hurled them one by one across the room as hard as he could throw them, knocking a water glass off his dresser and sending an etched glass lamp crashing to the cypress floor.
He didn't want Savannah Chandler in his head. He didn't want Laurel Chandler in his heart. He didn't want responsibility, couldn't handle it. He'd proven himself time and again. He was his father's son, the product of his mother's weakness and his old man's hate.
And he had another corpse on his conscience.
Clutching his hands over his head, he howled his rage and his pain up at the plaster medallion on the ceiling.
Why? When he wanted nothing from anyone, when he had given up all hope of having the kind of life he had always dreamed of—why did he still get pulled in? He'd done his best to avoid emotional entanglements. He'd made it clear to everyone that he shouldn't be relied upon. Yet here he was, in it up to his ears. The frustration of it hardened and trembled inside him. Eyes wild, chest heaving, he swung around in search of something else to vent it on.
Laurel stood in the doorway.
Everything inside Jack went instantly still and soft at the sight of her. The anger that had cloaked him vaporized, leaving him feeling naked and vulnerable, his heart pumping too hard in his chest. She looked like a waif in her baggy jeans and rumpled T-shirt. Her eyes, so warm and blue, dominated her small, pale face.
“Savannah is dead,” she whispered.
“I heard.”
She crossed her arms and kicked herself for wishing he would come to her and wrap her up in his embrace. That was what she had come here for: comfort and to escape the sound of sobbing and the incessant ringing of the telephone. Reporters calling in search of a story, friends calling to express genuine sympathy, towns-people calling on the pretense of compassion to appease their morbid curiosity. She had come to escape the ghoulish bustle of cops searching her sister's room and hauling her car away and asking redundant questions until she wanted to scream. She had come in search of a moment's peace, but as her gaze scanned over the wreckage from Jack's rage, she had the sinking feeling she wasn't going to find any.
“I'm going down to Prejean's to see her.”
“Jesus, Laurel . . .”
“I have to. She's—” She blinked hard and swallowed back the present tense, grimacing at the bitter taste. “She was my sister. I can't just let her go . . . alone . . .”
Tears glossed across her vision, blurring her image of Jack. She didn't want to let them fall, not yet. Not in front of anyone. Later, when night had come and she'd seen to all the duties she needed to, when she was alone. All alone . . . She had to be strong now, just like when Daddy had died. Only when Daddy had died, she had had Savannah to lean on.
Don't cry, Baby. Daddy's gone, but we'll always have each other.
She gulped a breath of air and tried to distract herself from the memory by making a mental list of the things she needed to do. See Savannah, see that the arrangements were being made, and that Mr. Prejean had the right clothes to put her in, and that pink roses were ordered. Pink roses were Savannah's favorite. She would want lots of them, with baby's breath and white satin ribbons.
The grief hit her broadside, like a battering ram, and staggered her, shattering the strength that had somehow managed to hold her up during the endless interview with Kenner and Danjermond. She fell to her knees amid the debris from Jack's desk and put her face in her hands, sobbing as it tore through her with talons like daggers.
“Oh, God, she's dead!”
Jack didn't give himself time to think about his own pain, his own needs, the distance he had meant to put between himself and Laurel. He couldn't stand by and watch her fall apart. He didn't have it in him to walk away. The love he never should have allowed to take root bound him there, drew him to her.
He knelt beside her and gathered her close, squeezing his eyes shut at the sound of her weeping. The sobs racked her body, making him acutely aware of how small she was, how fragile. He cradled her against him as if she were made of crystal, and stroked her hair and kissed her temple, and rocked her, crooning to her softly in a language he wasn't even sure she understood.
“I miss her so much!” Laurel choked the words out, a fist of regret and remorse lodged in her throat.
The feelings filled her, ached in her bones, in her muscles, like a virus. Loss. Such a terrible sense of loss, an emptiness as hard as steel inside her. It had been only a matter of hours, and yet the sense of loneliness was crushing.
Why? That one question arose again and again. Savannah's death seemed so senseless, so sadistic. What kind of God could allow such cruelty? Why? It was the same question she had asked twenty years ago, when her father had been taken away from her. No one had had an answer for it then, either.
That was perhaps the worst of it. She was a person with a logical, practical mind. If a thing made sense, had a reason behind it, she could understand at least. But things that struck from out of the blue defied logic. There was no reason, no explanation she might find some comfort in. That left her with nothing, nothing to cling to, not even hope, because in a world where anything might happen at any time, unpredictability shoved hope aside and left fear in its place.
“I hate this!” she whispered, her face pressed into Jack's shoulder. “I hate these feelings
. God, I wish I'd never come back here!”
Jack rocked her, tightening his arms around her. “It wouldn't have mattered, angel. It wouldn't have changed anything.”
Laurel thought of the trinkets the killer had left for her and wondered. Would he have sent them to someone else? Would he have killed some other woman's only sister?
Regardless of the answer, she was caught with the burden of guilt; someone died either way. Responsibility pressed down on her, just as it had in Scott County. She thought she would have given anything for the chance to get out, but she knew she wouldn't take the chance if it were offered. She was trapped by her own sense of duty and honor, stuck here in yet another nightmare.
“I'd undo it for you if I could,” Jack said softly.
Jack, who claimed to be nobody's hero, would have gone back and changed history for her. Laurel slipped her arms around him and held on, knowing he wasn't the man to anchor her life to. But the need and the knowledge clashed inside her, and need won out for the moment.
“We can go away for a few days,” he whispered. “Get away from it. I know a cabin over on Bayou Noir—”
“I can't.” Laurel sat back a little, blinking up at him through her tears. She swiped a hand under her eyes and combed her hair back with her fingers. “I—I can't go anywhere. There are things to do—arrangements—” She swallowed hard and let the real reason come to the fore. “I have to find out who did this. Someone has to pay.”
“And you have to be the one to catch him?” Jack said sharply, her sense of responsibility rubbing against the grain of his selfishness. He wanted her safe and all to himself, if not forever, then for a little while. “We've got a sheriff for that.”
“The killer isn't sending the sheriff trophies from his conquests,” she said bleakly. “He's sent me three.”
The news hit Jack with the force of a baseball bat, leaving him incredulous, a little dizzy, a little sick. A murderer had singled her out. He sat back on his heels, his jaw slack, his fingers tight as he held her at arm's length. “He's sent you what?”
“An earring. I don't know whose. And Annie Gerrard's necklace. This morning I found a necklace of Savannah's in my pocketbook.”
“Jesus Christ, Laurel! That's all the more reason to get the hell out!”
“That's what you'd do, Jack?” She arched a brow, studying him hard enough that he dropped his hands and glanced away. “Cut and run? I don't think so. For all you like to play it that way, I don't think you would. I know I can't.”
“You'd rather end up with a silk scarf knotted around your throat?” he said brutally, his hands shaking at the idea of anyone's hurting her. The concern set everything inside him shaking. He never should have gotten involved with her. Of all the women he could have had, he'd fallen for the one who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“I don't fit the pattern,” she said. “I'm not promiscuous.”
“You been sleeping with me, haven't you, 'tite chatte?”
Laurel scowled at the sardonic edge in his voice. “That's different.”
He gave an exaggerated shrug. “How is that different? You hardly know me, we go to bed together, we have sex. How is that different? You think this killer is gonna split hairs?”
“Stop it!” she snapped, hating him for belittling what they had had together. Even if he didn't want to call it love, it was more than sex. It certainly wasn't in the same category as what Savannah had shared with the likes of Ronnie Peltier and Jimmy Lee Baldwin. Her fingers curled over some of the papers he had swept off his desk in his rage, and she snatched them up and threw them at him, a gesture that was more symbolic of futility than fury.
“You amaze me,” Jack said, grabbing hold of his anger with both hands. Better to be angry than afraid. Better to push her away than to cling to her when he knew he'd lose her in the end anyway. “You think you're Wonder Woman or something. Every bad thing that happens, you think you could have stopped it, you think you have to solve it, win the day for justice.”
“Oh, excuse me for being a responsible person!”
“That's not responsibility, that's arrogance.”
Laurel gasped as the jab stuck deep. “How dare you say that to me!” she said, her voice a trembling whisper that rose in pitch and volume with each word. “You sit up here in this private prison you bought yourself, drinking your liver into a knot, taking the blame for someone else ending their own life! Everything that happened was your fault—but, no, it's not really your fault because your father was a son of a bitch. Let's get him up here and we can have us a real finger-pointing session.”
“We can't,” he shouted, leaning over her.
“Why not?” she yelled, meeting his glare.
“Because I killed him!”
Like a marionette whose strings had been cut, Laurel plopped down on the floor amid the drift of manuscript pages and scribbled notes, stunned speechless.
“With my own two hands,” Jack whispered, lifting his hands for examination, the long, elegant fingers spread wide as he turned them this way and that.
He rose slowly to his feet, a strange calm settling inside him. He had wanted to be rid of her. Wasn't that what he had told himself as he walked the deserted streets of town in the gray mist before dawn? Loving her hurt too much, and the end, which was inevitable, would be excruciating. This was his chance to make the break, his chance to show her once and for all just what he was. Then she could walk away from him.
“He hit Maman one time too many. He knocked me aside too many times without ever thinking one day I wouldn't be puny and weak.”
He stared right through her, into his past, seeing it all once more—the shabby kitchen that smelled of grease, his mother cowering by the stained sink, Blackie going after her with his arm raised.
“I grabbed an iron skillet off the stove—it was the first thing that came to hand—and I hit him, smashed his skull in like an eggshell,” he said flatly, as if he needed to unplug all emotion to be able to tell the story. “I don't think I meant to kill him,” he said, though after all these years he still wasn't sure. Christ knew he had wished Blackie dead often enough, to put an end to the fear and the shame. “I just wanted him to stop hitting Maman. I was finally big enough to make him stop. That's all I wanted—for him to stop, for him to leave us alone.”
He sniffed and held his breath a moment, fighting the rise of childhood feelings and gathering the old bitterness as fuel to go on. “And while my mother sat on the floor with blood running out of her broken nose, crying over this man who had abused her and her children for seventeen years, I dragged his body out to our bâteau. I took ol' Blackie for a ride into the swamp, tied an anchor around his middle, and dumped him in the deepest, darkest water I could find. No need for a decent burial when he was going straight to hell anyway. No need to drag the sheriff into it. We all just pretended he went out on a bender and never came back.
“That's the kind of man you think you fell in love with, sugar,” he said, his voice low and rough. “You think you know me? You think you've got me pegged? You think mebbe there's something worth loving under all the scars? Think again. I killed my own father, drove my wife to suicide. I went from a profession where I got paid to lie and cheat to one that inspires twisted minds to commit murder.” A bitter smile twisted his mouth. “Yeah, I'm a helluva guy, chère. You oughta fall in love with the like of me.”
She didn't say a word, just sat there staring up at him with those wide eyes, and he knew he would have given anything to be the kind of man she needed. A bitter thought. A foolish thought. He was the last man she needed. Laurel deserved a champion, a knight in shining armor, not a jaded mercenary, not a man with ghosts. He was nothing but the worst kind of bastard. What he was doing to her now was absolute proof of that. Dieu, she'd just lost her sister, and here he was breaking her heart just to save what was left of his own.
One of the papers on the floor caught his eye, and he bent and grabbed it up, a sad parody of a smile
pulling at his lips as he read his own handwriting. He had forgotten all about his ulterior motive for getting to know her. Such a poor ruse, he hadn't made more than a token effort to convince himself. But here it was in black and white, just in time to finish the job of cutting his own throat.
“Here,” he murmured, handing it to her. “Here's the kind of man you come to in your hour of grief, angel. I'm sorry you didn' believe me the first time I told you.”
Laurel didn't look at the piece of notebook paper she held in her hand. She stood up slowly on rubbery legs and watched Jack walk away from her. He went out onto the balcony without looking back, and she felt as though he had taken her heart out there with him. When she finally dropped her gaze to the carelessly scrawled notes, she knew he had pitched it off the balcony and into the murky waters of the bayou.
Laurel—obsessed with justice. A burden of guilt from past sins, real or imagined. Subdues femininity (unsuccessfully) with baggy clothes, etc. Represses sexuality (perfect conflict with prospective hero). A fascinating dichotomy of strength and fragility. Strong ties to dead father.
Need to get details on case that sent her over the edge. Were the accused guilty? Did she just want them to he? Why? Could write abuse into background.
A character profile. He'd been studying her, making notes for future reference. Her gaze fell to the floor, picking out the odd newspaper clippings among the sheets of typing paper and lined paper. The headlines jumped up at her as if they were three-dimensional: Scott County Prosecutor Cries Wolf. Charges Dismissed, Chandler Resigns.
She wouldn't have believed it was possible to hurt more than she already did. She would have been wrong. A new spring of pain bubbled up inside her. It was on a different level than the pain of losing Savannah, but it was no less sharp, no less acidic.
It wasn't as if he hadn't warned her, she thought, lashes beating back a fresh sheen of tears. It wasn't as if she hadn't warned herself. He wasn't the man for her. This wasn't the time. Too bad she had never gotten her heart to listen.
